Here's another way to look at it - if you have 1000 disks and run them for 1200 hours each, the manufacturer expects one to fail.

I'm not sure about the smaller ones, but the 300GB version is quite price competitive. It's about the same price as the X25-M 160GB when it launched a year and a half ago, and slightly more than the 256GB drives in the market.

For my workstation, I'd consider the promise of reliability more important than I would consider some extra 10,000 IOPS or 100MB/s which I can't notice under workstation use anyway.

Hm who's this owikh guy and how do I order from him?

ahh found his full member name - owikh84 - i was trying to look for owikh just now

On SSD endurance - the way I use my SSDs, there's really no worries to have about endurance.

X25-M 80GB bought in late 2009 - 8TB written, 95% media wearout indicator (higher is better)
Intel 320 160GB bought in Jun 2011 - 15TB written, 98% wearout

Happy with them so far. They've saved me and my staff much time